August StrindbergSource: The Lotus Magazine, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Nov., 1913), pp. 124-129Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20543496 .

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August Strindberg-from an Etching by Zorn

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AUGUST STRINDBERG

TILL a few months ago scarcely any one in England or America knew

more of Strindberg than they could learn from floating gossip about a mad Swedish author with no very savoury reputation, or from occasional ineffi cient performances on Sunday even ings of plays that seemed to confirm that reputation as just. A tiny room by the back-door of theatre-land showed a horrible drama about a husband and father goaded into madness by his wife.

The Court Theatre, London, gave a play about a girl of familywho seduc ed her footman and then committed suicide. Both plays revealed a strange intensity of dramatic power, an un usually significant use of detail and ob servation, and a mind beset with the horror of simple facts which are either the most beautiful or the most ugly things in life, according as the mind that sees them is clean and brave or not. Then, about the time that Strind berg died, in the May of last year, England and America began to find opportunities, through the work of ardent students and translators of his books and plays, to revise their scanty and inaccurate knowledge. Those who troubled to inquire found that Strind berg, though an unfortunate and in some senses a very bad husband, was not the notorious evil-liver which ru

mour had painted him; that, so far from being an immoral author, he was, in purpose and sincerity, almost wholly a moral author; that, besides being a

novelist and dramatist, he was a scien tific experimentalist of some knowledge and of high imagination, which had only needed direction and patience to make his achievement valuable; an historian, a philosopher, an alchemist, a naturalist-a man, in fine, of an ex traordinary active brain and a prolific

writer on subjects of many kinds. And now, with three or four firms of pub lishers spreading translations of his autobiographical and imaginative works, it is possible to arrive at some idea of a strange mind which had kept Sweden and France and Germany ex ercised for a good many years.

What is written above is the intro duction, in the London "Times," to an eminently sane review of Strind berg's work. The author was sixty three when he died. He was the son of a man of family and a woman of

none. His childhood was unhappy; his youth full of struggle and poverty. He made, and broke, three marriages. Restlessness, unhappiness, the public anger aroused by his attacks on Swed ish life and persons, and by his atti tude to the movement of the " eman cipation of women,7"drove him abroad. For a period of some five years (of which he gives an account in two of his now published books) he was the victim of delusions, through which he passed into the haven of a form of re ligion. All his life he was a violent

worker, an inexhaustible writer. His mind found rest, if at all, only late.

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I 26 THE LOTUS MAGAZINE

His energy, or his restlessness, drove him on from belief to belief. In youth a rather blatant freethinker, a "cor rupter of youth," as he called himself, an advocate of liberty-if not license of thought and conduct, he all but sur rendered at one period to Catholicism, and reached in middle age a form of Puritanism. The only things stable in him were certain tendencies of his na ture that will perhaps emerge from a study of the autobiographical books and of others that he wrote.

We may grant him an exceptional sensitiveness to whatever is disagree able. That is plain, from the first, in "The Bondwoman's Son," his account of his own childhood. What to healthy children. even of good intelligence, is a nuisance-restraint, repression, nag ging by parents and so forth-was to AugustStrindbergtorture. He seems to have known, even in childhood, that he was unhappy to a degree which people well versed in the minds of children believe very uncommon. In later years he was to make use of this sensitiveness, not only in his studies of his own mind, but in his plays and novels. The boy Strindberg was the father of the acutely suffering man in The Father^, or of Maurice, the young playwright who topples through vice into misery and so into religion, in Ther-e are Crimzes anzd Crimles. "The Bondwoman's Son" gives us also an othercluetohisnature. Thisisanugly business and wNre propose to attack it at once and get it over. At the age of eight Strindberg determined to kill himself because of his feelings for a little girl. The story might be passed over as merely silly, if he had not lived to write " The Confession of a Fool."

That is the book in which, without any kind of reticence, he tells the story of his first marriage-his relations with the lady before their legal union, their miserable life together, and the unpleasant details of its ending. It is a story that ought only to be told in camner'a, and we refer to it merely for the elucidation of a single element in in the author's nature. It was not self deception that induced Strindberg to declare that the chief obstacle to his separation from his first wife was his sense of honour and of the integrity of the family. He believed firmly in the integrity of the family; he profess ed to believe that woman had no other

mission in life but to be the link be tween the father and his children. But a patient reading of "The Confession of a Fool" makes it clear that what bound him to his first wife was not so much the motives he pleads, as a phy sical obsession. And it is only fair to

warn the intending reader of Strind berg's works that throughout them his attitude on these matters is not healthy, is not normal.

Of what value to humanity is the study of the abnormal? There is a tendency at present to put a wrong emphasis upon it. Just as every man is the better for having some knowl edge of the human body in health and sickness, so every man is the better for having some knowledge of the human mind in health and sickness. But here, as in knowledge of all kinds, the manner of presentation is everything. It is right for the lay

man to know that soap and water, and plenty of them, are good for the skin, and why; it is not good for him to be presented with a work on skin

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AUGUST STRINDBERG I 27

diseases as an ennobling work of liter ature. In the same way, anyone with a tendency to sex-obsession or perse cution mania may be the better for knowing what is wrong with him and how he may get his mind clean. The normal mind cannot be the better for being dragged through a minute an alysis of such uncleanness, suchwretch edness, as are to be found in the three autobiographical books before us. "An American Critic," we read in one of the introductions, "says ' Strind berg is the greatest subjectivist of all time.' Certainly neither Augustine,

Rousseau, nor Tolstoy have laid bare their souls to the finest fibre with more ruthless sincerity than the great Swed ish realist." But we do not praise grammatically or ungrammatically the old lady in the " hydro " because her description of her "symptoms" is more vivid and particular than any we have heard before. We leave the room. And to all who are not professional healers of mind or body the study of such books as "Inferno" or "Legends"

must be, for all their "ruthless sin cerity," as profitless and as disagree able as the drawing-room talk of the hydro. Augustine - Rousseau - Tol stoy: two of them were great and beau tiful souls, whose struggles towards peace cannot but quicken the reader through his sense of beauty, however

much he may disagree with their con clusions. The other was a far more normal person than Strindberg; and, not to speak of its delicate lights and shades, of the art and wit of the writ ing, his "Confessions" are so full of the frailties of the average man that they induced in any sane reader a healthy laugh at his own expense.

The " ruthless sincerity" of Strind berg has produced something quite different.

In Strindberg's kind of sensitiveness -the acute feeling of what happens to oneself, whether physically or men tally-lies the germ of egomania. In "Inferno" and "Legends" Strindberg shows us in full -blast the egomania that developed out of his sensitive ness. They form the description of his life in Paris and elsewhere during the years when he was subject to de lusions. The delusions were of a kind that we believe to be well known to students of mental aberration. He is always pursued by enemies, whose favourite plan is to fix electric wires to his bed and so attack his heart. He is consumed by self-pity. If a noise occurs in his restaurant or his hotel, it was made purposely to annoy him. Joined with this-and indeed its coun terpart, since such delusions as these presuppose an overweening regard for self-is spiritual pride. He visits a set of lively friends, and is annoyed with their gaiety, their very kindness to him.

" Had I avoided these people out of unjustifiable pride it would have been logical to punish me for it, but as my avoidance of them sprang from a de sire to purify myself and to deepen my spiritual life in self-communion, I do not understand the ways of Provi dence "-of Providence, who ought, of course, to have seen that his conde scension in mixing with sinners was rewarded on the spot. A friend invites him to breakfast, and-" I decline, be cause the right bank is forbidden to

me; it is the so-called 'world,' the world of the living and of vanity."

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I28 THE LOTUS MAGAZINE

He visits the house where his little daughter is living, and finds that he must give up his solitary morning walk, during which hewas "all soul," in order to take his child with him, listen to her prattle, and answer her questions. " It is intensely annoying.

What a penance-to be loved!" And what of the men to whom such " penance" would be joy? So, through a growing sensitiveness to omens and supernatural hints, in which every thing that he sees is directed at him self, he comes by degrees to learn that not all his enemies are mortal. His mother-in-law gives him for dinner calves' head, a dish that he dislikes. " It is too much! Formerly I attributed these annoyances to feminine malice; now I acquit every one, and say, 'It is the Devil! "' Men are given over to the Prince of this World, and suicide is the only refuge. A little later he learns from Swedenborg that it is not the

Devil. It is God who sends these omens, these persecutions

" Earth, earth is hell-the dungeon appointed by a superior power, in

which I cannot move a step without injuring the happiness of others, and in which others cannot remain happy

without hurting me.... " Let us therefore suffer without

hoping for any real joy in life, for, my brothers, we are in hell. . . . Let us rejoice in our torments, as though they

were the paying off of so many debts, and let us count it a mercy that we do not know the real reason why we are punished....

" Self-contempt, anger at one's own personality, the result of vain endeav ours to improve oneself-that is the way to higher life."

Thus this ardent thinker, this lover of intellectual strife, sinks in the last surrender. His faith deserts him, and he runs for shelter to a faith that is no faith, but a folding of the hands in de spair. For revulsions of this kind therc is usually a physiological basis. Per haps the following quotation may give a hint:

" Often it happens that the mere love of drink gets the upper hand, accom panied by unbridled hilarity and cyni cal suggestions. One's lower nature breaks through and the brutal instincts find free scope. It is so pleasant to be an animal for awhile, one thinks to oneself, and besides life is not always so cheerful, and so on, to the same effect. One day, after I have for some time taken part in riotous drinking bouts, I am on the way to my restau rant. I pass by an undertaker's shop

where a coffin is exposed to view. The street is strewn with fir branches, and the great bell of the cathedral is tolling a knell. Arrived at the restaurant, I find my table companion in trouble, as he has come straight from the hospital,

where he has taken leave of a dying friend. As I return home after dinner by back streets, where I have not been before, I meet two funeral processions. How everything reeks of death today, and the tolling of the knell recom mences! "

There is plenty of evidence in these pages of' one secret of Strindberg's state of mind. If this man, one reflects, had taken plenty of exercise, had known the value of cold water in large quanti ties for internal and external use, had tuned himself up, body and mind, by the simple self-mastery implied in these things, would not his great brain

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AUGUST STRINDBERG 129

have produced work with more in it of the beauty that preserves? The other reflection is this: that some al lowance must be made for the period in which he spent his earlier years.

There is abundant evidence in these books that the Sweden of his youth was passing through a period which only the German language has a phrase to describe-Stui zin iid D1^ang-a per iod of revolt against accepted forms and beliefs, in which extravagance and alcohol played parts not easily measur ed by better balanced and deeplier rooted peoples. Strindberg lived to see the failure of his own generation's high hopes. As the growth had been violent, the withering was devastation. Naturalism, materialism, had proclaim ed illimitable powers in human nature.

One by one its champions dropped off, as Strindberg tells us, into madhouses, destitution, or suicide. The reaction helped to drive Strindberg himself through madness into contempt of hu

man nature, and that kind of faith in God which is a denial of God's good ness.

Other writers have been mad; other writers have been oppressed with a sense of sin. But assuredly not all

madness sees further than sanity. Lu cretius went mad, and he too was con temnptor divomn; but in his poem his vi tality and his love of life and of beauty

exorcise the demons of pessimism and despair. Dante and Heine both passed through hell; and Bunyan and Cowper suffered agonies of remorse. But in all these we may find one or both of two qualities that Strindberg lacked-quali ties of mind, or of character, that have little connection with qualities of brain.

Either they shoulder the burden and fight through their despair like men of courage and self-mastery, or they have in them an essential sweetness, an TLEWKELa, which stands in place of faith in life and faith in man to such of them as believe that they have no such faith. In Strindberg one searches in vain for any such qualities. Setting aside the autobiographical works, his literature as a whole is a literature of hate and of ugliness. Life is hell, he implies, even in works written before the period of his delusions; made hell by the conflict of man and woman, by the breaking up of old standards and the breaking down of new. And the intensity of his observation only em phasizes the partiality of his vision. Strange, "mystical" plays like The Dreain Play, romantic plays like Mar git, sharply naturalistic plays like Thze Father or Miss Julia, all tell the same story-of a mind raging at life because it is blind to three-quarters of life, and cursing the world because it has not learned the rudiments of self-mastery.

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